Thursday, March 18, 2010

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

I am just going to assume that Google would not make such a claim unless it could prove it six ways to Sunday.

In which case we have 18 marketing agencies from the sock puppet school of marketing. Sigh.

Surely all of Viacom's shows have fan clubs; most likely Facebook pages. That is what fan clubs and Facebook pages are for. Before a show you send out Tivo alerts; after a show you send out the links to online video on your own site. You put social tagging on your site, and then you just let nature take its course.